In a cloud based application service, images can be rendered as part of an executing application, encoded into a video stream, and then delivered to a client computing device for display to a user. Certain applications can be more resource intensive than others. For example, a fast moving game application can require significantly more graphical processing to render images than a CAD application. On a physical server system or sets of servers, the amount of resources, for video rendering is limited, i.e., there is a maximum level of computational resources available to be used by applications.
As additional applications are started and actively running on a server system, such as when additional application virtual machines (VMs) are created, the available resources of the server system are allocated to each of the VMs. Due to the physical limitation of the maximum computational resources available, there will be a maximum number of VMs that can actively be run on the server system before there is a degradation in response and execution speed of the application VM. Currently, the industry method of resolving this issue is to add additional servers systems to support additional application VMs, thereby adding cost to the environment for the hardware, the physical space required, and the system engineers to maintain the additional server systems.
To display an image with the optimal display quality, especially on a liquid crystal (LCD), organic light-emitting diode (OLED), or other kind of flat panel display, one has to render the image at a resolution that matches the native resolution of the display. As the native resolutions continue to increase, from the current ˜8 million pixels (4K) to ˜32 million pixels (8K) or even more, rendering an image at these high resolutions can be very expensive in terms of resource and time. Also, when an image is rendered remotely and has to be transmitted to the display, the higher resolutions place an increasing burden on the communications link. It is noted that these displays can span a wide range of physical dimensions, from the few inches of a smartphone screen, to many feet for a large flat panel.